Tag Archives: Bit.ly
Bitly Acquires Social Media Publishing Service Twitterfeed
Bitly has acquired social media publishing service Twitterfeed. I’m happy for Twitterfeed because Pulse2.com used them for publishing our blog posts to our Twitter account and it had worked out great. We had only recently switched to FeedBurner. The Bitly and Twitterfeed team are currently coming up with ways to combine their services to “make the social web a better place.”
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Categories Bit.ly, Peter Stern, Twitterfeed
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Bitly Now Allows You To Set Up Custom Short Domain Names For Free
URL shortening service Bit.ly previously charged for their premium service Bitly Pro. The advantage of Bitly Pro was the ability to create custom short domains. Some of their clients include gat.es (The Gates Foundation), diddy.it (Diddy), and cart.mn (South Park). Bitly Pro is now out of beta and is available for free and with no waiting charge. Register the short domain that you prefer to use and point it to Bitly’s servers. Then hook up your Bitly account at http://bitly.com/a/account. [Bitly Blog]
Categories Bit.ly, Bitly Pro
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Bit.ly Raises $8.9 Million In Series B Financing
Popular URL shortening and analytics service Bit.ly has raised $8.9 million in Series B financing. This round of funding was led by AOL Ventures and RRE Ventures. Existing investors include Betaworks, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, Founders Fund, and SV Angel. Every day about 200 million Bit.ly short links are clicked on through Twitter and other services. Even though Bit.ly is no longer the default URL shortening service for Twitter, the traffic continues to grow for the service.
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Domain Name URL Shorteners .Ly At Risk By Libyan Government
Domain name URL shorteners that end in .ly may be at risk by the Libyan government. Ben Metcalfe blogged that his domain name vb.ly was seized by NIC.ly, the domain name registry system for Libya. Vb.ly may not be the only short URL company to be at risk. Bit.ly, Ow.ly, and Ad.ly are all at risk. Below is some additional details from Metcalfe’s blog post:
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Categories Ben Metcalfe, Bit.ly, Vb.ly
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Rumor: Yahoo! Has Interest In Buying Bit.ly
Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) is rumored to have an interest in buying New York based URL shortening and tracking company Bit.ly. The talks are still in early stages. However if Bit.ly plans to sell, we could expect it to go for over $10 million given that they raised $3.5 million in VC funding from Ron Conway and other angel investors.
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Categories Bit.ly, Om Malik, Ron Conway, Yahoo!
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Bit.ly Raises $1.5 Million From VCs and Received 2.7 Billion Clicks Last Month
URL shortening service Bit.ly has been growing at an aggressive rate as they have become the default for Twitter. Given their current growth rate, the company needed another injection of cash as they have raised $1.5 million from previous investors. These investors include Betaworks, SoftTech (Jeff Clavier), Ron Conway, Mitch Kapor, Chris Sacca, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Howard Lindzon. The funding was added to an SEC filing and TechCrunch confirmed the round with Bit.ly President John Borthwick. The $1.5 million round was set up as a convertible debt note. Bit.ly received 2.7 billion clicks last month. last week alone about 744 million Bit.ly links were clicked on. [TechCrunch]
Bit.ly Launches Pro Services In Beta
Bit.ly has launched a Pro service that allows custom short URLs owned by publication companies to have analytics services. Bit.ly will provide the analytics technology behind the custom short URLs owned by the publication companies. As part of the beta program, publications with short URLs such as AOL, TechCrunch, IGN, The Wall Street Journal, GDGT, MTV, MSN, and The Huffington Post will have reports on how many people clicked on a link, where the visitors came from, etc.
A dashboard will be added to the real-time analytics service provided by Bit.ly. This is very useful to publication companies that experience volumes of traffic from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, e-mail, IM services, and SMS. Below are a couple of screenshots of the new service. The announcement was made on the Bit.ly blog.
The short URL battle is heating up as Google and Facebook have entered the mix. Google’s short URL is called goo.gl and Facebook’s short URL is fb.me.
Categories Bit.ly, Bit.ly Pro, Facebook, Google
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Bit.ly Is Battling Spam With The Help Of VeriSign, Sophos, and Websense
Bit.ly is the biggest URL shortening service thanks to the popularity of Twitter. Given that websites and files are masked by Bit.ly, spammers and virus artists are taking advantage of the situation. A normal message may be followed by a Bit.ly URL that links to a malicious website. In a blog post from earlier today, Bit.ly announced that they are partnering with VeriSign, Websense, and Sophos to scan through links and identify which of them are spam are viruses. Bit.ly has about $2 million in funding and became the Twitter default URL shortening service in May 2009. Bit.ly is based in New York City.
Categories Bit.ly, Sophos, VeriSign Inc., Websense
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Google, TypePad, and CBS Now Using Bit.ly For URL Shortening
One of the reasons why Tr.im decided to initially shut themselves down is because of the monopoly that Bit.ly has for URL shortening services. Twitter and TweetDeck both use Bit.ly as the default URL shortening services. Now Google, TypePad, and CBS has embraced Bit.ly for shortening the URLs of their content.
One of the reasons why Bit.ly has become the preferred choice for URL shortening is because of their constant service upgrades. Last month Bit.ly started to track what links are malicious in content and warns users before sending them to the link.
Within the last few weeks, Google added Bit.ly to Google Reader’s “send-to” feature. This feature allows anyone using Google Reader to send Bit.ly links on Twitter to their followers.
TypePad added a feature that generates Bit.ly links on Twitter for new blog posts. Bit.ly statistics have also been added into TypePad’s dashboard. All TypePad users will see this feature integrated by this fall.
CBS is also launched a new service called cbs.bit.ly. This service tracks the URLs on CBS’ website that has been shortened and tracks how many people clicked on the shortened links.
John Resig of Mozilla also designed a Retweet button using the Bit.ly JavaScript API.
Categories Bit.ly, CBS, CBS Corp, CBS Corporation, Google, Google Reader, John Resig, Six Apart, Six Apart Ltd, TypePad
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Tr.im Decides Not To Shut Down
Nambu has decided to restore and open their website Tr.im because many people protested when they said that they were planning to shut it down. Nambu said that they were planning to shut down Tr.im because Bit.ly is the default URL shortening service on Twitter. Tr.im said that Bit.ly and Twitter are closely involved with each other which gives Twitter application developers a disadvantage.
Below are some of the additional sentiments written on the Tr.im blog:
1. Twitter has stacked the URL shortening business opportunity overwhelmingly in bit.ly’s favour, as twitter.com currently operates. This is not whining, as some have suggested, but a simple reality. If we post a link to this blog article by its title Twitter switches our tr.im URL to a bit.ly URL.
bit.ly has a monopoly position that cannot be challenged with reasonable investment or innovation unless Twitter offers choice. This is a basic reality of challenging monopolies. bit.ly has deep personal connections and agreements with Twitter that we simply cannot compete with. And it is our humble opinion that this type of favoritism will become an issue for all Twitter developers.
2. We too want to see tr.im live on, but feel we can only transition it to another party committed to ensuring the links are not highjacked in any way. A contract for sale to an unknown group or individual simply cannot guarantee that.
3. We have no interest in framing tr.im URLs, or adding interstitial advertising to redirects, and some have suggested we do, or others would do with tr.im should they acquire it. We will simply never do that out of respect for the fact that users created tr.im URLs based on this commitment. We do not see that as a viable revenue model as well, as it is not expected or welcomed by the individual visiting a shortened link.
4. This was not a public-relations stunt. At all.
[via Tr.im blog]
Categories Bit.ly, Nambu, Tr.im, Twitter
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